Summer Reading
Over the summer there is always an opportunity to catch up on reading. I have just finished reading ‘The Interpretation of Murder’ by Jed Rubenfeld. This is a work of fiction but set against the factual background of Sigmund Freud arriving in New York in 1909 on his only visit to the Untied States in the company of Carl Jung and a band of followers. The social scene in New York and the contemporary setting has been meticulously studied and is brilliantly portrayed.
I was less keen on the psychoanalysis aspects of the book but it is, nevertheless, an excellent read with twists and turns in the plot, and a riddle that is hard to solve, but the denouement is convincing and compelling.
I have been dipping into John Major’s book on cricket ‘More Than A Game’, which of course is lovingly written by a Prime Minister who had a passion for the game and who examines its origins from the famous Hambledon Club up until the start of the 20th Century.
I am now about to start on ‘The Vicar of Bullhampton’, one of the Anthony Trollope’s that I haven’t yet read. I find Trollope wonderfully relaxing and soothing.
I have also been reading political biographies. I really enjoyed Francis Beckett’s book on Gordon Brown, who constitutes his sympathetic portrayal of the Prime Minister, and I have been dipping into Roy Jenkins’ ‘Gallery of 20th Century Portraits’. Roy Jenkins, of course, writes exquisitely and his pen portraits of politicians as diverse as Tony Benn, Lyndon Johnson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Macmillan and Christopher Soames make excellent reading.
I have also got Tom Bower’s ‘Gordon Brown’, and Anthony Gidden’s ‘Over To You Mr Brown’ to read, as well as ‘After Blair: David Cameron the Conservative Tradition’ by Keiron O’Hara. The first edition of this book was published in February 2005 and actually reviewed by David Cameron himself in the Guardian. He described the book as compelling and persuasive. This edition has been re-written to take account of two and a half eventful years. Indeed such has been the pace of change in those two and half years that David Cameron doesn’t even get a mention in the first book. His rise has indeed been meteoric.
